Radial businessmen agree that Article 103 of the Organic Law of Communication has harmed them for five years, because it led them to change their programming to fulfill the obligation and not the requirements and tastes of the audiences.

The interpreters, for their part, question the lack of true regulations. Five years have elapsed since the Organic Law of Communication (LOC) came into force, which has been questioned from various areas.

One of them is article 103, referring to the dissemination of musical content that is supposed to benefit national artists. But can you talk about benefits? Álvaro Rosero, director of radio EXA FM, said that from the beginning he warned that the implementation of this regulation would cause a damage to the different radio stations.

“It definitely did not benefit in any way. We express our concern about this issue, which was part of the first drafts of the Law. ” He said that this led the stations to change their programming to comply with the regulations, but not to satisfy the audiences, which hurt them.

And with article 103 the radios are obliged to broadcast in equal quantity the music of foreign and national artists, that is, 50% of musical content must be Ecuadorian production. In order to comply with the provision, the radios did so at low tune times: from 00:00 to 06:00. In May 2017, a reform was made to Article 75 of the General Regulation to the LOC, where it was stipulated that the musical content of national artists should be broadcasted in high synchronization schedules, which was not defined.

This was confirmed by Ximena Segura, Legal National Superintendent of the Superintendence of Information and Communication (Supercom), who pointed out that these high synchronization schedules are not yet specified in the Law or in the Regulations. “It is the Council for the Regulation and Development of Information and Communication (Cordicom) that should issue a regulation to understand which are the hours that are considered high reception, but until this date does not have the same,” she lamented.

She added that there has been no impact on the radio media, since they have been able to access more national production. She considered that it is not a restrictive or exclusive rule.

Ramiro Vela, journalist and broadcaster of the province of Tungurahua, stressed the importance of having a regulation based on programming, the style of the media and national production. On the other hand, Jorge Yunda, musical producer, stressed that nothing forced is good and that the 1×1 has not fulfilled its role, for that reason “we have not really had a surge of artists”. According to the consulted ones, at the moment the incidence of the radios has been minimum, because the technological advances have caused that the young people can download music of the diverse musical platforms.

Even 70% of some advertising brands would be destined to digital media, causing an economic loss for traditional media. According to the Supercom, the LOC benefited the national artists by having more spaces to disseminate their productions. In 2016 he created the Latitude 1×1 Platform, so that they have an online tool to promote their music and that the media access it.

Rosero said he had not known the Plataforma Latitud 1×1 or the access to the contents. “When you have an institution whose daily action was to persecute the media on the one hand and on the other intended to provide you with musical content, the result was to be expected: an absolute failure,” he complained.

He even considers that it was sold as “a miracle of the music industry,” and that it was approved under a confrontational scheme, creating factions: the good guys and the bad guys, where it was made to look like the bad guys were the media. In front they put the artists, producers, politicians, like they were victims of the media.” (I)